Home / Locations / Hertfordshire / Stevenage / St Nicholas and Symonds Green
Yes, Yikes Car Wash now covers the north and west of Stevenage: St Nicholas, the streets between the Old Town and the Lister Hospital, and Symonds Green and Fishers Green on the far side of the A1(M) slip roads. We clean cars where they are parked: at the kerb in the roads off Ripon Road and Canterbury Way, on the drives in the 1970s closes around Filey Close, and in the courts behind the flats. Book online, pick a two hour window, and a vetted local washer from the Yikes Network arrives with water, power and kit.
Book your washKey facts
Parking reality
The Lister Hospital moved from Hitchin to the northern edge of Stevenage in 1972, opened by the Queen Mother, and it is now a 730 bed general hospital with an accident and emergency department and a 667 space multi storey. Parking there costs from £3.80 for up to an hour to £11.80 for the day, charged around the clock, and the price goes up every September. The streets of St Nicholas on the hospital's doorstep feel the consequences: staff and visitors looking for a free space, and the council answering with restrictions. A St Nicholas ward order that came into force on 1 November 2025 added waiting restrictions and a ban on verge and footway parking in Iona Close, Lincoln Road, Salisbury Road and Winchester Close, with the stated aim of keeping traffic moving and protecting the verges.
Symonds Green is a different story. It was built mostly in the 1970s as a mix of council, housing association and private homes around an old common, with its neighbourhood centre on Filey Close, a Co-op, a chemist and a takeaway on the ground floor, a car park to the east for the centre and the community hall, and the Tom Tiddlers pub beside a surface car park. The closes have drives; the flats have courts.
The whole point of a wash that comes to you here is that your car does not give up its space. Your washer parks where they can, legally, and carries the kit to the car, whether that is a drive in Symonds Green or a kerbside bay in St Nicholas with a hospital shift change happening around it.
What the north of town does to a car
Symonds Green sits hard against the A1(M), and junction 8 is the way most of the west side of town gets anywhere, so the cars here carry motorway film and brake dust as a matter of course. St Nicholas has the trees of the old village around the church and the open fields of Forster Country to the north, the last farmland inside the borough, which means sap and droppings on one side and field dust on the other. Symonds Green's ponds, the main feature of its conservation area, bring the birds that go with still water.
Winter adds salt from the county's gritters, which have been on standby since 1 October and treat about 1,500 miles of priority road, Lytton Way and the A602 included. Salt, sap and dust all sit on paint for weeks if they are left. A wash every few weeks takes them off before they mark, and your washer rinses before anything touches the paint.
How it works
Local life
A church from the 12th century, a Tudor barn on a common, a novelist's farmhouse and the county's biggest hospital. These are the places that shape a week here.
The earliest part dates from the 12th century and the list of rectors is nearly complete from 1213. Around 1500 the church gained its decorative woodwork and a clerestory. The first Saxon village grew up in the clearing around it before moving down to the Great North Road.
Source: Wikipedia: Stevenage
E. M. Forster lived at Rooks Nest near the church from 1884 to 1894 and made it the setting for Howards End. The farmland north of the church, Forster Country, is the last inside the borough; 2,000 people petitioned the council over plans for it in 2023.
Source: Wikipedia: Stevenage
Designated in June 1977 around the old common. Three buildings are Grade II listed, including a barn that is a near complete example of late 16th or early 17th century Hertfordshire timber framing, the oldest surviving building in the area.
Source: Wikipedia: Symonds Green
A beer shop stood on the Green in the censuses of 1841 and 1851, run by Elizabeth Moules from Walkern. The present building dates from about 1920, was extended in 1980, became a restaurant called Tranquil Turtle in 2021 and is now an event venue. The ponds beside it are the heart of the conservation area.
Source: Wikipedia: Symonds Green
Named in 1943 for Joseph Lister, the pioneer of aseptic surgery who went to school in Hitchin, the hospital grew out of the Hitchin workhouse of 1836 and moved to Stevenage in 1972. A £150 million transformation was completed in October 2014.
The playing fields south of the Green, outside the conservation area but the open space the 1970s estate was built around.
Source: Wikipedia: Symonds Green
The 2021 Census counts 8,141 people in St Nicholas ward and 6,076 in Symonds Green. Both are flat heavy by Stevenage standards, 27 and 29 percent of homes, and both have a fifth of homes privately rented, which around the Lister means nurses and junior doctors. Car ownership is 83 percent in St Nicholas and 79 percent in Symonds Green, and only 5 percent of St Nicholas homes are detached, so most cars live at the kerb or on a short drive.
More on this: how a wash works on a restricted street and every service and price.
See it in action
Yikes Car Wash live on GB News: washing cars through the hosepipe ban. The video loads from YouTube only when you press play.
See the latest washes. Before and afters, new areas and the team on the road, on our Instagram.
@yikescarwash on InstagramPopular in Symonds Green
The quick outside wash: book it and you do not need to be in.
Outside wash and an inside vacuum, done at the kerb.
The fuller clean, inside and out, for the family car.
Shampoo, steam and protect the whole interior.
What's on locally
Updated 25 October 2026
Symonds Green questions
Next door
We check local details against council, TfL and other official sources before we publish them. Parking rules change, so always check the sign at your bay.
Pop in your SG1 postcode, pick a window, and leave the rest to us.
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